aBigForehead

I watched Brick Lane last night. As I settled in I was sure I wouldn’t enjoy the film as much as the book. Within minutes of the film unfolding I was propelled back in time to another time and place- Sihanoukville Cambodia days before that Tsunami, days spent reading under shades of trees on the beach and nights in a two-bed room overlooking the coast. This is where I read Brick Lane.

I try and return my mind to the present but the internal moving images are more compelling and I am drawn back to that time. It is night and I am deep in sleep; the stillness is complete and I am comfortable- used as I am to sleeping in strange places. I am woken suddenly from sleep by a repetitive sound, rat-tat-tat-rat-tat-tat, by the side of the bed; in the quiet of night it sounds menacing to my awakening mind and I jump upright and stand on the bed. The sound continues undeterred, I don’t know what it is and in the pitch dark it is impossible to see this thing that goes rat-tat-tat in the night. I step to the back of the bed and leap toward the light switch, away from the sound near the bed and land on the lino floor by the door.

I flick on the switch and look. Nothing. I still hear the sound. Shifting my position I see a pool of water by the bed just where my legs would have touched had I swung out of bed after a night’s rest. Above it, a trickle of water appears in the ceiling, falls and disappears into the pool below. Rain? I wonder. It was not a creature scurring across the lino floor but rain. A stench slams into my face and engulfs me- no, it is not rain either. I cover my nose and mouth. Urine. The pool sits there and releases its fumes into the room.

I scramble into the bathroom looking for something to mop up the mess with. I am certain it’s cat pee, my dislike of cats propels me and I waste no time. There is nothing in the bathroom to use. I look around the room and my eyes settle on the rectangle of carpet at the door. I grab it and place it over the pool; I wait for it to absorb the fluid and move the carpet. I gag and tear up. What is the purpose of cats? Who insists on their survival?

Eventually I clear up the mess and leave the carpet outside the door but there is no hope of the smell leaving the confines of the room easily. I open the window and return to sleep in the other bed under the open window and merciful coastal breeze.

I smile at the memory. The film, the film….oh she isn’t as I imagined her and the husband isn’t as repulsive as I had drawn in my mind.

All through the film I am drawn back in time over and over. Somebody asked me recently what I got from travelling, did I find myself, did I change? I remember saying it was the first time I allowed myself to get close to people and I was changed in that way- more open, less afraid of people’s baggage, their capacity to hurt. Inbetween watching the film- I preferred my Brick Lane movie, the one I saw when I read the book- I admitted to myself that it was more than that, it was more, it was love, I had fallen in love with mankind. Not quite the content of everyday conversation, not quite and yet it would be dishonest, ungrateful of me to deny that I was loved by strangers and that I learned to love unconditionally in that time.

In the quiet of the cinema it is hard to stay composed, up on the screen there isn’t a scene that moves, any sniffles would be unwelcome, inappropriate. I struggle for composure but it gets worse, I remember my mother holding me in the weeks before I left to travel, crying because I was crying and I crying more because my mother was crying that I was crying. Rock bottom, that was home then and that moment when my mother asked how she could help, my unwillingness to articulate my grief to save her further pain, my fear I would diminish in her eyes left only silence and in that vacuum nature poured love. I still feel it; that certainty that I was loved. In the pain there was bliss. And so God teaches…

My mother’s advice was to stop crying about everything. I nodded weakly. I left for India and cried for my poor pathetic self, so often did I touch and wipe my eyes I developed conjunctivitis. Now my eyes weeped even when I wasn’t weeping. I would waken in the morning in another strange room and my eyes would stay glued together with retribution and I would have to remember what town I was in, the lay of the room and grope towards the bathroom and cleansing water.

What I could see through sticky, runny eyes though was poverty and struggle. Soon I forgot to weep for myself and weeped instead for others. My eyes cleared, my mosquito bites healed. I asked myself what the highlights of my trip thus far were and they were mostly centred around people. I remembered the female monk who found me one morning sitting forlorn only minutes after I had said, please God send me someone to talk to. And there almost instantaneously was a voice saying hello. We spent hours together; I remembered that I could laugh and laugh I did until I nearly fell off my chair. She was half white, half Native American, worked with black civil liberty groups in the 60s, became a monk in Nepal, taught in Thailand and was in India to do something special. She said, u know what? I said what. She said I think God sent you to me. And you to me I thought beaming.

As I moved from place to place, stopping to live in Cambodia(as one does), my capacity to give, do, help grew and grew; the more I did the more I got. And that is unconditional love- action separate from reward, the expectation of a reward irrelevant; the paradox- the less I thought about what was in it for me, the more I got back.

I let go of that new way of being when I returned home, not immediately but within a few months. Some of the old self-focus returned, people became problems, there was pain and struggle. My lesson hadn’t imprinted itself well enough. Later I relearned and thrived; then I forgot and there was suffering this year.

Recently I visited some of the boys at Feltham, strangers in a strange land and we talked. What did we talk about? Regret, the past, the future, PS3s, books, family, xalwa, mothers, reality checks, violence, cells.. As they walked away at the end of the time we had together my heart strings felt a tug.  Love, I remember.